What A Mess

by Bryan

The problem with having cable companies and telephone companies as ISPs is that they don’t have any real experience creating web sites, and so they contract the job out. My current ISP must have hired someone who was too terrible to work on healthcare.gov.

First off, they don’t understand the difference between a sales and marketing web site, designed to bring in new business, and a web sites for the people who are already customers.

Trying to establish an account was one of the worst experiences with a web site I have ever had.

First off, there is the assumed knowledge – I was expected to know that they only gave me the part of the account number that changes, and I should automatically insert the 6 digits at the beginning that all accounts have in common, 6 digits that will appear on the written bill, if I ever get a written bill. Then there was the Personal Identification Number that no one told me I had or what it was.

The other annoyance was their password evaluation app. I generated a 14 character password with upper and lower case letters, numbers, and special characters, and their ‘evaluator’ declared it too weak to use. So then I went back and re-entered the first 8 characters, and the ‘evaluator’ found it acceptable. There is no information as to what they consider acceptable in passwords, all you have is the colored bar graph.

I assume that these guys provide e-mail accounts, but I’m too busy to find out if they exist. I may get one later that I can give to annoying people because I certainly have no intention of looking at anything that goes there.

Sorry m8… Not laughing at you! Simply that you have just discovered the pathetic el-cheapo free java/php/flash plugin design that plagues most of what passes for *web design* these days! They just grab a free component to fit in the *box* to do *something* (like registration, creating passwords, email, and many others). The problem is, most of the *free* stuff is truly ‘WYSIWYG’ and little, if any, flexibility or customization is possible. It was probably created by some exec’s teen kid over some holiday.

So many companies with a captive market do it to save a bundle and it’s your problem to deal with, what do they care? *shrug*

The citizens of the city have gotten together and thrown out all of their elected officials, disbanded the police department, and removed the highly questionable annexation that made their speed trap possible. The Florida legislature is giving them some breathing room to hold new elections and straighten out their books.

Rule number one in speed traps is don’t catch your local representative to the Legislature – he might get annoyed.

No polling is worth spit until at least September, because too many things will change in the mean time.

It got worse, Kryten – they ‘created a web site just for me’. It falls in the category of ‘my first web page with really big graphics’. It is too embarrassing to share the URL. It is obvious that web design is being handled by marketing.

Well, I would certainly hope that no one paid for the password evaluator

The problem with the town was a lack of local reporting as to what was going on, which is a common problem with all of the local newspapers being consolidated, and local reporters laid off. You can’t fix it if you don’t know it’s broken.

The GOP captured state legislatures in 2010 by getting a huge turnout, that allowed them to redistrict everything. The Dems have just been badly led and poorly organized under Zero, who has only been concerned with his election, not building the party.

The real campaign doesn’t begin until September, and currently all of the political advertising is being done by private conservative groups. In September it will look like the Dems are surging, but they aren’t, they just finally entered the fight.

"A person who has a cat by the tail knows a whole lot more about cats than someone who has just read about them."

Mark Twain

"There are two novels that can change a bookish 14-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."

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